


Ars Memoriae

by teaberryblue



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Art History, Blood, Illustrated, Interior Architecture, Knives, M/M, Memory Palace, Metaliterature, Mythology - Freeform, Place as Character, Sicilian Folktales, architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 21:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8028796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teaberryblue/pseuds/teaberryblue
Summary: This is my story from RAW: A Hannibal/Will Fanthology, an exploration of the changing topography/architecture of Hannibal's memory palace over the course of the three seasons of Hannibal. Gorgeous art by E.L. (dontopenthat on tumblr. See their post with the art here)





	Ars Memoriae

** **

**I.**

At the top of the terrace of the Boboli Gardens, at just the precise moment of late afternoon, sunlight glances off Brunelleschi’s Dome in brilliant hues that turn red brickwork to glimmering gold. The city, at this height, is expansive, open: it is a subject of some amazement that souls do not escape to dance above the rooftops in the air. Invisible to the eye above, on the maze of streets below, great shrines to a bygone age commingle with shops and restaurants catering to gawking tourists. Visitors in shorts and tee shirts try and fail to cajole their way into the great churches, ticket vendors gesturing helplessly at the signs depicting the dress codes.

The streets are a nervous system: old and new, constantly constructing, constantly demolishing. The memory of every footstep lies imprinted here: every life that was ever lived has passed this way. They can be felt in the air; ghosts are an electrical charge, not creatures in white sheets.

**II.**

Below the city’s surface, in a low-ceilinged room, two men hide. Their crimes and their fates mirror each other: both have created art that displeases their patrons.

The walls are painted in charcoal and clay, graphite and blood. The anatomical sketches stand out against the rough surfaces. The first man placed them here. They are a map, a key, a letter to the second.

The second passes through, centuries later. Both men hide in plain sight. The first hid beneath the sacristy he designed for the men who hunt him. The second hides behind dark glasses. The second man is nominally a tourist, but he takes this room, memorizes the details, adds it to his interior architecture.

**III.**

The next time he sees the room beneath the sacristy, there is a bloodstain on the stone floor that does not fade with age. There are days when the wound opens again, and the blood spreads, red and glistening in the gloom.

**IV.**

The art of burying secrets requires diligence, control, and care. Secrets, hidden, metastasize, filling the tomb one builds for them, oozing into the cracks and crannies, seeping through the gaps. A secret must be contained, to size, to keep it from growing too large, but if the coffin that holds a secret is too small, it flexes against the walls of its prison, finds the knots in the grain, exploits the weakness in the wood.  
  
There is a proper depth for every secret. It must be deep enough that it stays buried, shallow enough that it can be unearthed, removed, inspected, and put back in its place.

**V.**

In the graveyard, each headstone is identical, bearing the same name, stretching as far as the eye can see, in every direction. She is memorialized again and again. Some graves are old, the stones crumbling, the inscriptions worn away by time and weather, covered in moss or overgrown by high grasses. Others are fresh, strewn with slowly rotting flowers that give off the vegetal scents of sweetness and death.

**VI.**

She died for the first time long before he ever saw the house by the sea. She would never have imagined a place so sleek, modern, fashionable. It’s a bittersweet irony that this is where she lives now. Her tiny bedroom is at odds with the rest of the house, full of soft things and paper lanterns.  
  
In her domain, the walls, like the lanterns, are softly translucent. They glow with warmth, lined like rose quartz with hairline capillaries, and sometimes the walls here pulse: expanding, contracting, like a muscle.

**VII.**

Sometimes, when adrenaline ebbs and leaves him cold, washing from his body like the water that flows, veined with crimson, down tiled walls and chrome drains, he locks her door from the outside, to keep her from seeing fully what he’s become in her absence.  
  
Sometimes the door is locked with a bolt, sometimes with a skeleton key.

**VIII.**

The house by the sea overlooks a promontory, surrounded by cliffs. There is only one way to the house, one way to leave: a long and winding path up a hill.  
  
There are places where the path diverges, dendritic branches that can only receive signals but never transmit, never find their way in. Travelers who take the paths are deceived into believing they have found their way to the inner sanctum. The ends are inviting, comfortable; there is soft music and wine of flawless vintage. It is easy for them to be satisfied with their discovery, to linger too long, to forget their ultimate goal, like children picking flowers in the woods at the behest of a wolf. To find one’s way in, one must not be lured away, one must take the most direct route, ignore distractions and complications. Simplicity in all things.

**IX.**

There is a woman who walks the path to the promontory, dressed all in black, and one might mistake her for a moving shadow if they do not know where to look.  
  
Sometimes she is human, sometimes she is a hawk, watching from the trees with keen eyes, elegant and lethal.

**X.**

The city of Palermo has four patronesses, one for each season. Christina, the patroness of the Spring, the patroness of the chapel, was a child when her father tried to kill her.

**XI.**

Restoration is in itself an art. Craft and aesthetic evolve, and the tools of the original builder are lost, improved upon, changed irrevocably. It is not enough to put the pieces back together if the conservator can’t access the same materials. The cracks will show.  
  
The mosaics of the Capella Palatina were painstakingly completed in the twelfth century; the images of Christ and St. Peter flanked a window that flooded the main apse with sunlight. The beams once danced off the glimmering gold, made the entire chapel brilliant and alive.  
  
The window is covered now, bricked off. A garish mosaic of the Virgin Enthroned hides its former location. It is too modern, too new. Even the untrained eye will notice the stylistic dissimilarity between the Virgin and her companions, but the secret of what she is hiding is more abstruse.  
  
Here, in this particular set of blueprints, she guards the gates to the path that winds up to the house by the sea. She is a window, she is a door, an entry to his heart in gleaming gold.

**XII.**

He sets rules to govern the architecture of his domain. Everything is regimented, rules built on rules, crystalline and fractal-like. Two serpents decorate the floor of the chapel. They twine around his heart, muscular and restrictive. Sometimes, they reappear in other parts of his architecture as an afterimage projected bright on dark surfaces. The bloodstain can never spread past the serpents.  
  
But then, one day, he sees a dark stain on the floor, flowing pasts the serpents’ entwined tails. It is at once familiar and strange; he kneels down to touch it, and his hand comes away clean. He licks his fingers: nothing. It is not blood, but water.  
  
An uneven line of marks spread across the stone like footprints.  
  
Saint Christina’s footprints remained wherever she walked: on the ground, on pavement, on floors, deep impressions in stone, the tiny feet of a young girl. But these are larger, a man’s footprints, and their marks evaporate into the air. Still, he imagines he sees them, long after they vanish. It is almost more disconcerting that they are temporary. He buries everything deeper.

**XIII.**

In Sicily, they tell a folktale of a king with two daughters, or three daughters, depending on the teller.  
  
The first daughter was kidnapped by fairies, taken underground, stolen from those who loved her.  
  
The second daughter was stifled by her home, by the sadness of the loss of her sister, by her father’s preoccupation and protectiveness.  
  
The third daughter was not a child at all, but a doll, so perfect and precisely sculpted that she was the mirror image of the second daughter. Even the king could only tell the difference by the hairline cracks in the porcelain.

**XIV.**

The Chapel itself is hidden away, a single drawing in a sheaf of papers, tied together with a satin bow of deep red.

It is perfectly executed in two-point perspective, the unassuming Norman architecture melting into the façade of the Palazzo Reale, details of lines and curves in stark graphite that shines off cream-colored, rough-toothed, acid-free rag paper.  
  
The collection of papers has moved, over the years. Sometimes they are displayed in frames, neat rows of pencil drawings on a white wall. Sometimes they lay out in plain sight, scattered on a table or a desk.  
  
Sometimes they are bound in a book.  
  
On occasion, he takes them out and looks at them, frowns at the progression of his artwork. Like the blueprints of a house that has been added to over the years, they are a cacophony of structure and style, each part reflecting the taste of a given time and emotion.  
  
When he notices a flaw in the collection, he is tempted to take an eraser to it, or scratch it out with a fingernail, to press down hard with graphite and mark over the parts that now seem imperfect, remove a door or a lamp or a blade of grass.  
  
It would be so easy to improve it from his imagination, to ignore the flaws of the world, to add his own fantasies to the collection of structures and landscapes. Instead, he tears up the old and recreates it line for line. He copies from one memory into another, painstakingly, diligently, faithfully, no matter his inclinations otherwise.

**XV.**

No one has come to the house in eons. Years bleed into centuries; structures crumble and are replaced, drawings fade to pale gray on brown, crumbling paper. But everything remains precisely where he put it: streets on paper, windows behind mosaics, bones in graves, keys in locks, hawks in the trees, blood on the floor, everything wrapped carefully in ribbons and deposited in the center of a city built like a labyrinth, its axons branching out to infinity.

**XVI.**

The word ‘labyrinth’ is not, etymologically, connected to the structure of a maze, but the structure of a double-headed axe.

**XVII.**

And then, one day, without warning, the papers are strewn on the floor, whether by a gust of wind or human intervention, he doesn’t know.  
  
The graphite drawing of the chapel lies face down in the blood on the floor, which is wet today, gleaming in the light, fresh and smelling of life.  
  
The blood marks out footprints on the floor: the tiny feet of a young girl. These don’t evaporate. He wipes the lacquered wood clean with a white cloth, but there is a chill at the back of his neck, and a sense that someone is looking for him.

**XVIII.**

The chapel is disrupted, too: here, the same footprints leave marks in the stone, up the center aisle, up to the altar, each shallow indentation pooling bright with crimson.  
  
The tiles in the mosaics have been reordered, are out of pattern. Someone has rambled through Genesis. There, on the fifth day, the fish have been snatched from the stream and gutted, the fowl have been slaughtered, their feathers plucked.  
  
And above the main apse, where the window was plastered over, the virgin’s throne is empty.

**XIX.**

The footprints climb up the promontory, firmly pressed into the earth, sharp grooves in the rock, and when they reach the steps to the door, they are marked out in blood again.  
  
The door is open, swinging in the breeze. Inside, he can smell her, can sense her all around, like a Goldilocks who crept in to sleep in all the beds. At first, he follows her footprints, but they are a maze, a scrawl, overlapping and tracking back over themselves, circles inside circles, paintings of knots that mimic the serpents carved in the floor, binding his heart without warning.  
  
There is so much blood here it can’t be wiped out.

**XX.**

One day, whether by accident or design, the doll was left on a windowsill, sitting in plain view of the orchards beyond the castle wall. A man who was passing by—some say another king, some say a prince— saw the doll and was enchanted, and scaled the wall, thinking the doll was a girl. He saw the cracks in her skull, and wondered who had broken her. Even though she was only a doll, he rescued her from the palace and took her away with him.

**XXI.**

He can’t tell if his guest’s presence is an affront to the child in her sanctuary, to the bones in the grave.  
  
“I didn’t invite her,” he tries to explain. He isn’t entirely certain whether it’s the truth.  
  
When he descends the stairs from the room, when he ascends the hill from the cemetery, he finds a knife on the dining room table, a bone-handled hunting knife. It is slender, elegant, shining silver in one moment, slick with blood the next.  
  
He wipes the blade and puts it in his pocket: perhaps his guest will come looking for it.

**XXII.**

In the morning, the knife is gone. In the afternoon, he finds it in the kitchen. He pockets it once more. In the evening, it is gone again. In the dead of night, he finds it on his desk, in the library.

**XXIII.**

The trouble with guests, in a place built of senses, is that once they understand your heart, have lived inside the atria and wandered through the valves, they start, brazenly, to rearrange the space. It’s not as if they can help it: they have become part of the map; their marks upon it are indelible.

**XXIV.**

_Hic etiam homines magna cornua habentes longitudine quatuor pedum, et sunt etiam serpentes tante magnitudinis, ut unum bovem comedant integrum._

**XXV.**

He finds the knife on an open windowsill, glimmering in the sun, long splinters of paint scraped away from the window frame where it had been sealed shut.  
  
There are small yellow songbirds singing, and the sound of a rushing stream. His response is irrational; the birdsong piques him for some unknown reason.  
  
Carefully, slowly, he eases the window shut again, and relishes the silence. When he turns back to face the room, there is a door in the east wall, replacing the framed print of Picasso’s _Minotauromachy_.  
  
He steps to the offending door, but finds himself glancing over his shoulder, willing the room to remain as it is, daring it to change while his eyes are on it.  
  
He lifts the door out of the wall, he lifts the house from the path and the path from the promontory, he lifts the chapel from the sketch and puts his book of drawings in a brown paper envelope, licks the seal shut, mails the package to a city far away.

**XXVI.**

He sits in an open-air cafe on a wide plaza: the face to the north is Florence, to the west is Paris, east is Amsterdam, and south is Madrid. The cities change location sometimes, to better flatter themselves by the angle of the sun. Depending on his mood and the space he wishes to inhabit, they occasionally change entirely.  
  
When his coffee comes, the cup is shattered. The segments of china quiver in place, held together as if by the surface tension of the scalding liquid inside. He doesn’t sip it, but lets the steam rise to his tongue.  
  
The envelope appears on the latticed table, neatly addressed in his own hand. But when he hefts it, something is wrong. It is heavier now than it was when he sent it off.  
  
He asks for a letter-opener. They bring him a knife.  
  
A bone-handled hunting knife.  
  
The knife is lighter than he expected, conforms to his grip as if it had been worn to the shape of his palm and fingers. When he slices the blade into the paper, he hears a sigh. Beneath his feet, the bloodstain spreads on the cobblestone street.  
  
Photographs fall out into his lap: black and white, on heavy paper. They’re images of a family: two parents, and a child, a young girl. They look happy, in that unassuming, impossible way, wearing their contentment with simplicity, not as a cloak put on for photographs.  
  
This is wrong. Someone is trying to fool him. He tears the photos into shreds, uncertain whether he’s the culprit.

**XXVII.**

His papers are gone, and he can’t will them back; he’s lost his own route to the house by the sea. He chooses a book off a shelf in his office, turns to a much-read chapter on the rarity of secularism in Byzantine art. He finds a photograph of the chapel to use as a conduit.  
  
He momentarily diverts himself, reads an opinion on the identity of the man carved on the marble candelabrum. The man is half-sitting, half-standing; he raises a cup as if in a toast.  
  
When he finds his way back to the chapel, there is a draft. The window once hidden by the Heavenly Mother is ajar. He peers into the woods beyond the window, and sees a strange new path up the hill. It’s a careless path, made by a man’s movement, underbrush trampled, marking the way to the most casual eye. There is blood on the brambles, blood on the leaves, a trail from the bottom of the hill up toward the house on the cliffs above. He realizes that the hawk has been hard at work, but even her talons haven’t been a sharp enough deterrent.  
  
This path will have to go. It crumbles, washes out, as if a sudden flash flood has wiped it from the map.

**XXVIII.**

He locks all the doors in the house, boards up the windows, puts up bars and chains and barbed wire. He digs a moat around his heart, swamplike and sinister, and fills it with things that bite: the sharp, snapping jaws of alligators. He builds no bridge.  
  
He plucks away the window from the chapel and hides it in his pocket, safe, where he can feel it against his thigh. There is one way in, and one way out, and both are through him. Simplicity in all things.

**XXIX.**

But for all his efforts, when he arrives at the house, he sees footprints on the walk. He knows them instantly: the larger size, the longer stride, the purposeful and direct way they make their approach, the way they brazenly step through impediments and not around. They are marked not with blood but with water. It pools dark and spreads shining over the stone.  
  
And here, where the tree line used to end, where the lawn was clean and neatly-groomed, the hedges cut with precision, here there are wildflowers growing rampant, weeds choking freshly-mowed grass, brambles rising in untamed masses, heavy with ripening berries that burst with purple juice.  
  
There are chittering squirrels and round, squat birds. They chirp and hop, brown and inelegant, the color of dirt.

**XXX.**

He doesn’t know what to expect when he walks in the door, but it isn’t this: two worn boots, laces untied, sitting in a puddle of murky water.  
  
There are no footprints past this point. The floor is clean, apart from the bloodstain that shifts in hue from red to brown to purple and back again. He has to guess which way to go, silently wondering at someone who could be so careless in his approach, yet so discreet now that he had breached the defenses of this place.  
  
He finds no trace of the trespasser here. He smells no scent. There are no prints, no marks, not in the halls or the bedrooms, not in the dining room or the closets or the cellar.  
  
Finally, in the kitchen, he finds the bone-handled knife sitting on the table. There is soft music playing that he can’t quite place. It’s never been part of his topography.  
  
There is a pot bubbling cheerily on the stove, sweet scents of cinnamon sugar and cranberry, the earthier, darker notes of sage and thyme.  
  
A pair of tortoiseshell glasses rest on a countertop.  
  
The table is set for three.

**XXXI.**

This is the kitchen, not the dining room: not a place for spectacle or show, not a place for costumes or masks or polite banter or best manners.  
  
It is more intimate than that, deathly intimate. The walls begin to fold outward like paper, like a pop-up illustration, an exploded diagram of a family meal.

**XXXII.**

He pulls the kitchen out, carefully, like a leaf from a book, folds it in quarters, puts it in the bottom of the wastebasket by his desk in his office and leaves it, lets it be hidden by the detritus that follows: bills and correspondence, torn envelopes, a hundred drawings of a clock.  
  
He can’t remove the trespasser from the house, so he removes the house from the trespasser: room after room, tearing them out until there is nothing but an empty binding.  
  
He traps him, there, between those empty bindings of hard board, embossed with gold motifs, the endpapers marbled in the Venetian style. He wedges the book into a filing cabinet of errata and apocrypha.  
  
This is where that book belongs, he argues to himself. It is a misprint, an error, a distraction.

**XXXIII.**

When he shuts the cabinet, locks it with a key, and turns back to his desk, there are blood-spots on the pages he had torn from the book, red like rose petals, in a spray over the smooth cream of the paper.

He starts to rifle through the pages; something’s changed, in all this imagery. The bone-handled knife appears in every picture, on every page. Sometimes it is in the grass, sometimes lying on a table. It is slicing through cheese, like a fancy dinner-knife. It is serving pie. It is jabbed into the trunks of trees, sap running down the bark, sticky and glistening like honey. Once, it is driven hilt-deep into the skull of a five-point buck.

**XXXIV.**

He wonders, briefly, if he can keep them like this, trapped in their respective cages. He tries to keep the one where he can take him out to look at him like a museum piece. He tries to keep the other just as he keeps the child in her sanctuary, where he can visit her at his leisure.  
  
He begins to rebuild his house. He starts with his heart, takes it out of its hiding place. He feels like St. Anthony, discovering the heart of the avaricious man locked away in a trunk like a jewel. He wonders fleetingly if this is a form of avarice, too. He doesn’t let himself dwell on it.  
  
He begins to re-bind the pages of his book, with a sharp awl and a long string of gut.  
  
But there are pages missing, now, pages he damaged or destroyed, and pages that seem to have appeared from thin air, pages that weren’t part of this book, before, certainly: a frozen lake, a field at twilight, a darkhouse, now sealed, vandalized, where a too-familiar bloodstain marks the floor, indelible.

**XXXV.**

The second daughter, the living one, the human one, went to find the man who had taken the doll. She stole back the doll, in the dead of night, but not before the thief became enchanted with her. He followed her back to her father’s house.  
  
But when she came to the door, her father recognized the doll but not the girl—she had changed, too much, in her quest to find her sister. He put the doll on the shelf and banished his human daughter to a dark hole, where there was never any sun.

**XXXVI.**

Everything is painstakingly restored, as close to the original as he can come. His heart is locked inside the house. The house sits up atop the cliff. The cliff rolls down the path to the chapel. The chapel is imprinted on coarse-toothed paper. The paper is tied up in ribbons and bows. The ribbons and bows sit on a desk in a room in a city like a maze on an island where boys and girls were sacrificed to a beast.  
  
He has made concessions: he isn’t sure how, or why, because he does not remember a conscious consideration. Still, there are more windows, more doors, more ways to get from one place to another. There are destinations, now, not dead ends.  
  
The paths up the hill lead to parks, to pastures. The moat is gone; in its place, there is a running brook. Its bubbling can be heard through the trees, the scales of fish can be seen glistening iridescent just below the surface of the cool, clear water, and there are wild animals in the woods. There is no longer an apex predator.  
  
This time, he sets the table himself. He chooses the dishes, the wine, the music.  
  
The table is set for three.

**XXXVII.**

The trouble with guests, in a place built of your vulnerabilities and most intimate parts, is that guests are temporary, and when they leave—which they inevitably will—they will take with them things that were only meant to be yours. Sometimes they leave even when you have set the table especially for them, even when you have laid out your best china, when you have prepared their favorite meals, given them the softest beds and the sweetest music and lit the warmest fires. They will leave you wounded, and there is no way to take those things back, even if you cut them with the sharpest blade.

**XXXVIII.**

He buries her again. This time it is not to memorialize her; this time it is so he can keep her. The headstones stretch out, endlessly in every direction, like a field with a crop of granite.  
  
He does something he has not done in a long time, and tends to every grave. He pulls the weeds, he polishes the stones, he lights candles and lays down fresh roses.

**XXXIX.**

The bloodstain has grown, expanding until all the floors in the house are dark with blood. It seeps out over the threshold and down the hill, leaving a glimmering trail like a crimson echo of snail slime.

**XL.**

His trespasser ignores his invitations. He opens all the doors and windows, plays music, cooks the most sumptuous food, all in the hope of luring him back. He finds himself waiting, glancing from windows, expecting to see the trespasser walking up the path, trudging through the woods, wading in the stream.  
  
He doesn’t arrive.  
  
His guest has become a permanent fixture, now that this is the only place she exists. Sometimes she is angry with him that she is no longer free to leave. There is an irony, he thinks, in that she had fought so hard to gain entry, and he had fought to cast her out. She is the victor in this battle, but the result leaves neither of them sated.  
  
She tells him that this is his failure, that he has broken their family beyond repair.  
  
The two of them still eat at a table with three place settings.

**XLI.**

It is possible to populate a place one has built with imaginary companions, but their behavior is mapped to one’s memory and dreams, never as authentic as the genuine articles. He tries to build him again, tries to put all the parts in the right order. He can create a fine simulacrum, but it is no more than a decoration, an elaborate wax doll or perhaps an automaton that conforms exceptionally well to a Turing test. He can put the man’s image beyond the window, to look up at him as he passes, the gold of the setting sun catching his curls and lighting them as if they are aflame. He can position the mirrors so that he can see him in the haziest part of his peripheral vision. He can watch him reading quietly, but the image has no will of its own. It follows his instruction, does as he wishes, which is precisely what the genuine article would not do.

**XLII.**

They fall into routine, he and his guest. The house becomes more solid. The restoration is now more firmly in his memory than what came before. They go for long walks, up and down the promontory, until they know every stone, every mushroom, every flower, every bird. They add to the landscape, together. She puts a fish in the river. He puts a fruit tree on the hill, and the shining cap of Brunelleschi’s dome in just the right configuration to let the sun fall on it here, too, so she can see. Now, it reminds them both of him.  
  
He forgets that he is waiting. But still, sometimes, he will walk to the front door at sunset, hold it open, and watch for the silhouette of a figure who is never going to walk up that path.

**XLIII.**

Saint Christina’s father tied her to a millstone and dropped her into the sea. She emerged, breathing, and full of life. Her footprints could not be washed away from the sandy shore.

**XLIV.**

And then, one day, church-bells ring at the wrong hour. They are cacophonous, clanging out an alarm instead of a melody.  
  
He looks up to see the Virgin marked out in her too-modern tiles on the opposing wall, still parted from her throne, but here, here inside his inner sanctum, brilliant against white paint.  
  
When he stands to greet her, he sees the footprints on the floor: footprints marked out in clear water, leading toward the kitchen.  
  
He can’t help but follow them.  
  
At the head is a man, half-sitting, half-standing; he raises a cup as if in a toast.  
  
The table is set for three.  
  
There is one empty place, waiting for him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, there is a post for it on Tumblr [here](http://teaberryblue.tumblr.com/post/150361217299/i-finally-posted-up-my-story-from-rawfanzine-ars)


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